When the job was finished, the eighteen-wheelers drove away, and most of the workers were dismissed. The reinforced screen doors were shut and the warehouse was lit up like a hockey rink around the thirteen large crates. A group of men gathered around one of them, along with Manolo Segura and Leone McMasters. Two warehousemen unscrewed the side of a crate using power drills, and eight others held it so it wouldn’t fall. When it was removed, the eyes of an extinguished sun god carved on a giant stone were looking right at them, with its mouth almost curled into a rueful smile, like a mobster who’d busted out of jail, expecting to be celebrated by his men.
* * *
WHEN BELLACOSA FINISHED recounting what had happened to him in the last few days, he left out a very important detail. Perhaps because it was difficult to even accept it had been real. He left out the part about taking the Trufflepig. The way he told it to Paco Herbert and Oswaldo, he left the Trufflepig squealing there in that mock hospital room, afraid they’d hear him if he would have taken it. Bellacosa’s mind kept going back to the Trufflepig sitting in his bathtub, with that bag of baby carrots. He was uneasy at first about not telling them, but as he continued with the story the more it sounded like it actually happened that way. Paco Herbert listened attentively and every now and then would jot something in one of his notebooks.
As he spoke, Bellacosa was deeply worried about his brother. Oswaldo looked weaker, more pallid than in the previous encounter they’d had. Bellacosa felt helpless and full of regret he didn’t try harder to find him, didn’t ask around enough, didn’t dig deeper. When Oswaldo moved closer to the flickering flame of the Bavarian candle, his pupils looked heavy as mercury and in the darkness retreated like fish into an abyss. There were times it wasn’t clear if Oswaldo was paying attention, and his head would drop as if he was dozing off. Then, slowly, he would nod or ask a question and seem genuinely interested.
When Bellacosa finished his story, Oswaldo said, “All that makes perfect sense to me,” as if he’d put the facts together on another plane of thought and confirmed that all the three-dimensional pieces fit.
“So, hold on a minute here,” Paco Herbert interrupted. “What they were doing in those labs sounds like they were trying to extract something like a vision from the people they were hooking to the Trufflepig. You said they asked you to remember if you saw any ancient monuments? Let’s remember, the Trufflepig is a mirror. It must also be a mirror of the subconscious. Of course. You said the men they were hooking up, most of them were traffickers, right, in the filtering business? I’m sure they were guilty of committing terrible crimes. Which is why they probably suffered and died, like you said about the one with the heart attacks. From the shock of what they’d done in life, when looking at what the Trufflepig reflected in their minds.”
Paco paced back and forth in the kitchen, muttering to himself, while Bellacosa thought of something to say to Oswaldo. Suddenly, like a man about to be hanged, Oswaldo sat up and began to plead with Bellacosa, as if they were alone to confide with one another in a monastery. He said, “Hermano. Hermano, I’m leaving you. This bridge where you see me. Where I’ve been living. No man should be left to live on this bridge. I stopped taking the broth, hermano. The worm’s been growing inside of me. Killing me from inside out, eating me like an apple. Rosita. Rosita del Escalon. She’s the only one that can help me now. To finish the ritual. Because my soul can’t be reversed now. Look at me. I can’t be left in this world much longer. But it’s okay. I did my deeds. My family is taken care of and I did my deeds. Manolo. You know, Manolo Segura, he’s going to get his death, too. The Phantom Recruits. They put a tail on him. He’s trying to become a big shot, get in with the kingpins. They’ll get him, brother, you’ll see. Slowly, they’ll capture the heartless. I’m ready to move on. And never return. I don’t want to come back here, brother, to this inferior heaven. Rosita can finish the process now, if you take me to her. Otherwise, I’ll be left here on this bridge. And could never rest in peace. My soul will be in turmoil forever. Can you please take me to her? Take me to Rosita, brother?”
Bellacosa, holding his brother’s dry hand, promised he would take him to Rosita. Oswaldo lost consciousness and Bellacosa’s shoulders trembled with profound sorrow.
Paco Herbert said, “I don’t think he’s dead. But he will be. He did this last night a few times. And like nothing he comes back to, you’ll see. But I think sooner or later he won’t come back. That’s the first I’ve heard about the Phantom Recruits from him. You know about them? This is incredible. And what did he mean about the worm? I don’t understand.”
“There’s a worm growing inside of him,” Bellacosa explained. “And he’s got to get it out every day, or it will eventually kill him. He said he hasn’t been doing it. So that’s probably what’s killing him. This woman he’s talking about, I don’t know how to find her.”
“He kept repeating her name last night. Along with yours. Rosita del Escalon. I checked public records this morning and found her. She lives in this old, tiny town, Los Alfaros. By the Rio Grande. He’s your brother, so I’ll leave it up to you to decide what to do. But, of course, I’ll help.”
Bellacosa stared at his brother’s flickering shadow against the wall, then hoisted him over his shoulder with surprising ease. It was the first time he’d felt his brother’s bones against his bones as a grown man. Paco Herbert opened the door and blew out the Bavarian candles. Bellacosa carried Oswaldo toward the old Jeep as it snowed, and the ceiling of the sky got lower and darker, like the city of MacArthur had been pushed under a table.
An old woman carrying a blue plastic grocery bag saw them and crossed herself.
Bellacosa said to her, “Buenas noches, señora.”
Paco Herbert, slightly concerned they’d been seen, said to the woman, “We’re journalists.”
They spread Oswaldo out in the back seat, then both got in the old Jeep. Bellacosa drove ten miles below the speed limit, at the behest of Paco Herbert, as he fiddled with the needle on the stereo. The cleanest signal was from the public access station, and The Aria Hour was on.
“Puccini.”
“You know about this kind of music?” Paco Herbert asked.
“Not much. But I know Puccini. Back when we were growing up there was a classical conservatory in Reinahermosa. They shut it down years ago and not many remember it. But I heard a lot of public recitals then, with my mother, as a boy.”
“You think your brother would remember?”
“Oswaldo? Maybe. Who knows. The truth is we grew up so different.”
“How?”
“I suppose just by different luck. Oswaldo had intellectual sensibilities. He was studious and enjoyed staying in school. I always read things here and there, but learned things mostly by working hard. In the world. The streets. Where am I going now?”
Paco Herbert read the directions aloud off his notebook, then asked, “Do you know where that is?”
“We can find it. This county isn’t too complicated a mousetrap. Like the old folks used to say.”
Paco Herbert turned his head and in the purple darkness looked at Oswaldo’s yellow, tubercular complexion. He winced, as if a hand inside his body was slowly squeezing his heart, threatening to take it. As they drove down Business 83 past Tenth Street, police vehicles were swarmed by the shoulder of the road with their lights on, and bundled-up officers were redirecting traffic. A couple of SUVs had rear-ended, and a garbage truck was on its side in front of them, trash spilled and blowing all over the road.
They drove past, into the town of Palmhurst, then Peñitas, and when they reached the ghost town Los Alfaros Bellacosa struggled to orient himself. Cold winds knocked at the windows like ghosts demanding to get in. Bellacosa recognized the area as being close to the Mexican border and the Rio Grande. They were driving down an unmarked road when suddenly it dead-ended. A bright red steel rail blocked a brushy area, with the shivering bones of a mesquite and some birch trees. The windows in the old Jeep fogged up,
the heater going full blast.
Bellacosa began a three-point turn, when off the road, about fifty yards away, the headlights flashed on a small brick shack, its chimney emitting a thick red smoke, like a carpet rolling out toward the sky. Paco Herbert and Bellacosa stared at the feathery snow and the blood-soaked smokestack for almost a minute without saying a word, the Jeep’s wipers slapping wildly.
Bellacosa got out and left the old Jeep running, walked toward the brick shack. Paco Herbert thought it would be wise to stay in the vehicle, and looked back at Oswaldo. He no longer held that wince, and was now in deep sleep. For the first time, Paco Herbert took a good look at the piercings around his mouth from the huarango thorns. Paco Herbert wondered if he could breathe out of them with his mouth shut, and if it was difficult to drink water. Those human acts, however, no longer seemed to apply to Oswaldo. Paco Herbert saw that Oswaldo was stuck in an interminable limbo, neither in hell nor in holy land. His soul was being tugged and stretched all over by invisible demons.
Paco Herbert reminded himself Oswaldo was once meant to be a counterfeit shrunken head. Only a pure-blooded Aranaña native could be involved in the process, if the shrunken head was to have any street market value. He’d written an article a few years back on the primary syndicates involved, from the kidnappers who found the victims, to the high-society dealers who found private collectors and buyers, who derived an exoticism from having them around, to lean on as conversation pieces and appear cultured. Paco Herbert had never heard of any victim surviving. Usually, if the victim’s blood was too European, and it was too late to dye the flesh a darker shade of brown, hired henchmen hopped up on crystal-kind would chop them to pieces and dissolve the remains in barrels of diesel gas. Or they’d simply mass bury them in a secluded area. There was one occasion when a group of unidentified men marched into a busy shopping center and dumped eight thirty-two-gallon garbage bags full of dismembered bodies right by the magazine and newspaper racks. They did it as a warning to all the rival syndicates, to flex their muscles about what they were capable of.
Now that drugs were free game, and the borders were opened for big businesses to cross into each other’s countries after the trade agreement, Paco Herbert thought everything had only gotten worse. The main trend now was drugs that made you lose your humanity to the extreme. Super-drugs like crystal-kind were being cooked up, drugs that flared the reptilian part of the brain, that made people take pleasure in being sadistically cruel toward other living things and to themselves.
Bellacosa returned and opened the back door. “This is the place,” he said.
Paco Herbert got out and Bellacosa hoisted his brother over his shoulder again. The old woman who’d removed the huarango thorns from Oswaldo was holding a lantern and wearing a maroon shawl under the thickening snowfall. The sky was a bulbous purple obsidian stone, and the snow crunched under their feet. Paco Herbert greeted the old woman. She didn’t respond and held the lantern close to Oswaldo’s face as he was carried inside the warm brick hut.
The old man with a bald head dotted with liver spots sat warming his gnarled feet at the fireplace. He had a short table by his side with a steaming cup of hot chocolate. Inside the fireplace was a cast-iron urn within the embers. The old man nodded at the men as they walked in, along with the old woman. There was a bed fashioned out of boards resembling a pallet, and the old woman, without saying anything, instructed Bellacosa to set Oswaldo on top of it.
She removed Oswaldo’s heel-worn boots, his socks with the toes burned off, and revealed his pallid yellow feet and brown, untrimmed toenails. From a small wooden oval box under the rickety bed she sprinkled a talc between his toes very delicately, like salt over a meal. Then between each toe she placed very short, thyme-like twigs.
The old man set his feet down on the floor and said, “Sit down, please.”
There were four chairs around a small, square table in the hut, along with an icebox. A narrow stove sat by the entrance to a dark room with no door that was the only other space in the hut. Paco Herbert noticed the fire’s shadows extended well beyond the chimney. They danced around the room, sometimes creeping along the walls and hiding inside dark crevices, eyeballing all of them like children, anxious to reveal a secret.
“Please sit down,” the old man repeated.
“Can we help her in something?” Bellacosa asked him.
“That depends. Is one of you family?”
“He is my brother.”
“My wife’s going to ask for a little of your blood. From the tip of your third finger. Are you afraid of knives, or the sight of blood?”
“I’m not afraid of it. What’s going to happen to him? Will he recover?”
The woman turned to face Bellacosa, and her husband read her expression for a silent moment. Nothing was said by either of them. From the waist of her long dress, the old woman pulled out an old brown knife with a dull-looking blade.
The old man said, “I lament to tell you this man was brought to us after he had already passed. My wife, her blood and her kind, are from the old world. Just by looking at his wound she recognized the thorns in the cicatrix pattern sewn around his mouth. She tried to finish it then, but he insisted to put it off when he woke up. The man had unfinished affairs, you see.”
In a heartbeat, Rosita took hold of Oswaldo’s right wrist, with his palm upward, and she sliced open his middle finger like it was a clove of garlic. Bellacosa jumped closer, startled, and Paco Herbert also moved in.
The old man said, “He has no blood of his own. What they did to this man. You don’t do that to people. They drain all the blood from the stone. First the sheep. Then the wolves. And then the men.”
Paco Herbert wrote this expression down in his notebook.
“They take your paradise,” the old man continued, “then our dreams of paradise. Then they try to take us, the dreamers.”
Rosita, with long metal pincers, fetched the cast-iron urn from the fire and, wearing oven mittens, unscrewed the top while wrapping the urn in a thick wool fabric. Inside the urn was a boiling liquid that hissed like a rattlesnake. She placed the wrapped urn beside Oswaldo’s head and grabbed Bellacosa’s right hand. Looking into his eyes with the utmost compassion and gratitude, she sliced open his finger like she did to Oswaldo. Bellacosa’s finger bled very much, and she guided the trickle into the urn. The four of them watched the blood ebb into the inky, boiling, mirrorlike liquid.
“This needs to be performed,” the old man continued, as Rosita removed Oswaldo’s coat and his shirt, signaling for Paco Herbert and Bellacosa to take a seat once again. “His soul needs to rest. Right now he lives in none of the seven worlds. He perceives only the darkness of every one of those worlds and is confused about where he belongs.”
Rosita placed the urn with the molten liquid, and Bellacosa’s blood bubbling along its surface, beside Oswaldo’s head. On the mantelpiece over the fireplace was a bushel of branches, shrubs, herbs. She grabbed them and passed them quickly over the flames. A soothing smell like burning orange peels streaked around the room, easing the tension.
Rosita held a meditative stance with her back to everybody. Then, moving like a fencer, she scrubbed Oswaldo’s body with the bushel, and in a high-pitched voice delivered a sermon in incomprehensible tongues. It seemed she was reciting a speech, or a prayer, or a one-sided dialogue with Oswaldo. Her face was animated and her voice carried a cursing tone. A grassy shadow-presence floated over Oswaldo’s body, and at one point Rosita spit on his bare torso and brutally beat him with the bushel. She stamped her feet and her high voice damned the grassy shadow-presence. Rosita spread the branches and herbs from head to toe over Oswaldo’s body, and stood over his head. She placed one hand on his forehead and one over his mouth.
The old man said, “I will be going to bed. She needs to spend all night with him in this way, to sweep his insides. I know it’s not very nice, especially with the weather, but I’m going to have to ask you not to spend the night in here. You see, w
e only have our bedroom in there, where I will sleep. And she has to be here with his body and spirit, on her own. You understand, right, caballeros?”
Bellacosa approached his brother as if to say goodbye, but, not wanting to interrupt Rosita’s process, he changed his mind and opened the front door. Paco Herbert took a couple of pills from his pocket and swallowed them dry as they walked away from the hut, the ground carpeted in snow. He took the back seat of the old Jeep and Bellacosa sat in the driver’s. Both of them were tired. Too much had happened that evening alone. It had finally stopped snowing and the wind was like an invisible iceberg, piercing through the freezing night.
Bellacosa turned the car on for the heater, and the radio was broadcasting news capsules. The anchor was saying, “… now that it’s arrived safely back on earth. This project, first conceived fifteen years ago, is finally bringing financial relief for the investors of Marswater. All fifty gallons the shuttle Homeria brought back were sold within an hour of the craft’s landing. You’re asking yourself, ‘Now, exactly how much is a sixteen-ounce bottle of water extracted from the red planet worth?’ The answer is four hundred and eighty thousand dollars, or seventy million cubic pesos.”
Bellacosa shut the radio off and muttered, “The silly rich.” He looked back at Paco Herbert, expecting him to be writing like a maniac, but he was already dozing. Bellacosa turned the car off, leaned back on his seat, and pretended to sleep until it happened.
* * *
THE SUN ROSE like a burning bale of cotton on the horizon, the clouds passed like a herd of eggplant-shaped buffalo, and the snow started to melt. It was dawn, and Bellacosa got out to take a leak, then knocked on the window over Paco Herbert’s head to wake him. There was an old bottle of water Bellacosa remembered under the passenger seat. He opened it and used it to wash his hands and splash his face and drink. His neck was sore and Bellacosa groaned as he stretched.
Tears of the Trufflepig: A Novel Page 20